Purple
by Position of Trust
Summary: After the battle, a silent, grieving hero visits a tomb strewn with purple flowers, and reflects on a tumultuous relationship and the death of a soul.


**Purple**

**Disclaimer:** Do I need a disclaimer? I name no names, I do not mention any HP specific places, so who's to say that it isn't all mine? I know, however, that if it were not for the work of J.K. Rowling and the artwork of Mafoku I would never have written this, so I owe thanks to both individuals.

**Author's Notes:** Thanks are due to my beta, _Alicia_, without whose dedication and grammatical skills this story would not have been the same. Admittedly it would have been ready in half the time (bathtub incidents aside) but it would not have been even this good. She writes under the penname Slytherin-Ali.

This story may be interpreted how you please. There is one way of interpreting it (and I will not say whether or not that way is correct) that might make you think that this is slash. It does not have to be if you don't want it to be. But equally it can if you do. It is based on the fan art _Purple Tomb_ by Mafoku, and if you have ever seen this picture you know what ship this is for. But keep quiet about it. I don't want to frighten anyone.

-

I knew that I would not be welcome, but I went anyway. I couldn't keep away. Some things just have to be done. The mausoleum was everything I had hoped it would not be. It was too grand; it did not speak of my loss but of twenty generations of aristocratic ostentation and show grief. There was no place here for the shattered emotions of my heart; nothing for someone who had lost everything, marooned in a black hole, beyond consolation.

I had to break in. I could not go to the Manor and ask; I would only have been refused. And then I would never get to say goodbye. More than anything else I did not want to see his mother's face tarnished with vindictive spite, as it would surely be in refusing me entry. I did not want to get into an undignified squabble over a body that meant so much to me and nothing but appearances to her.

I opened the door and slunk in. I moved between the tombs without a sound. I had done my screaming at the battle, surrounded by the bodies of the fallen, ruining my voice in my agony. A soul does not die quietly. And I had cried every night since, curled up in the private darkness where no one could see me; no one could intrude and no one could be shocked. Heroes don't cry. I would have liked to prove the world wrong but I just couldn't. I lacked the ruthlessness needed to shatter other people's illusions.

He lay at the end of the hall, stretched out on a new tomb, awaiting the funeral. There was a purple sheet under the body, and purple flower heads had been strewn around him. I ignored these details; all was insignificant in the face of the cold finality of death. The fact that it was a youthful face, the much cherished face of my lover, made the spectacle almost too hard for me to bear. I was famed for bravery. But I had learnt long ago that the hardest things we have to do, the ones that need us to be truly brave, are the ones that no one else notices. So I bore it in silence.

The silence was too loud. I looked down. Blond hair, somewhere between silver and yellow in colour, fanned across the purple backdrop. The eyes were tight shut. I was glad of that. They would not have sparkled had they been open. I would not have been able to stand seeing him glassy-eyed and staring. The sight before me was bad enough already. The skin tone was flat, the hair no longer shining. It was all lifeless, as lifeless as the young man it belonged to. I had seen dead people before. I had even seen some of them die. But it had never hurt me like this. It was as if I had only just realised the horrifying emptiness of death.

I looked scornfully at the purple. Didn't they know that he had hated purple? His own mother should have known. But then she ought to have known too that he did not want to be lain in the mausoleum. Although, if she had known, it would not have stopped her. She did what she wanted to do, and what she thought needed to be done. What was actually right never crossed her mind.

I could practically hear him in my head, saying: _You worry so much about what's right for the world that no one else can get a thought in edgeways_. Had he ever said that? It was exactly the sort of thing that he'd say, and it was annoyingly right. I thought about him: how we'd been enemies first, then rivals, and then, startlingly, allies. Though we had been on the same side and even spent time with each other, I had not really trusted him then. Somehow from there we'd become friends, and somewhere in our friendship we'd slipped into becoming lovers. I didn't really remember how it had all happened.

I did remember how he had come to change his mind. It had been a very personal issue that had done it, but then no sane person could imagine any concepts of a greater good taking root in that heart. It had taken his discovery, by virtue of a very near miss, that his own father was prepared to use him as a blood sacrifice for the deranged cause they had both believed in, the course he had been brought up to serve. He no longer believed. His faith had been broken that day.

After that, he could see that there was no future for him on the side that he was on, so he switched. It was that simple. No startling epiphanies. He was not redeemed. He was as flawed as he had ever been. Only the side had changed. He had been very quiet in the weeks after the incident; no one saw him or heard him much; but as a person he had not changed.

For a while he had been in shock and barely said a word. It was unnatural. I was suspicious. The whole story came tumbling out one day when I pushed him too far. He erupted in anger, pain and wounded pride, his once-perfect self-control destroyed. I had been amazed to hear the story, but I believed it. It would have been impossible to look into his wild eyes and doubt him still. I was not proud of having made him crack, but we had both agreed that it had been worth it.

Until now. Until that far-from-stranger Death had stalked back into my life and stolen the thing closest to my already bruised heart away. I was not a fool. I had known that it might happen. Knowing it had not made it any less real. I should have known better than to let myself love him and lay myself open like that. I did know better. But I had done it anyway, perhaps because the one thing I have always known about love is that it does not follow any rules.

And now I stood, dumbly staring, feeling as if my heart had been ripped from my body, and all I could see was those purple flowers. They tormented me. I stepped closer and stroked his cheek, as pale and as cold as a marble statue. Except he had always been more like an ice sculpture – cold, but too easy to melt; hard, but too easy to break apart, if you only knew where to hit. The silence stretched out and filled the world. The only thing I was conscious of was that I wanted to die.

I sat on the tomb, staring at the familiar narrow face for a ten second eternity. Then I lay back on that bed of purple flowers, my head by his feet, and I closed my eyes. I thought of poison and of knives, my grief driving my mind to thoughts of self-destruction. I curled up and sobbed as if in agony, crying fit to break my heart. But my heart lay around me already in fragments. Everyone I had ever loved was dead. My life meant nothing to me. I honestly believed that death would be a release.

Of course, my death would kill a nation's hope, but I was beyond caring about that. I did not care about anything. For that moment I knew exactly how _he_had always felt: as if no one else in the world mattered at all. I wanted to die. Never mind that suicide would be mass murder; that I would cast millions into the depths of despair and hand my side over to the enemy. I was only a figurehead, but they did not believe that. For one small moment of my life, I stopped being the hero and was just human – selfish and broken.

As moments do, it passed. I hiccupped and stopped crying. I pulled myself together, not without effort. I uncoiled myself and stood up. Laying on the tomb sobbing had released something in me. I still felt broken, but no longer felt that the damage was irreparable. The body lay there still, unaffected by anything: my grief could not touch him – had he ever learnt to laugh, he might have done so at the sight – and nor could the purple he hated and the place he had hoped never to see again.

For a second I felt angry. It had been cruel of the woman to do this, to him and to me. As far as I was concerned, no one cared more about him than me, however foolish such a sentiment might be. No one had been more distraught to see him dead. But that was irrelevant, apparently. I had no power to overrule his mother. I was sure that she had done it all to spite me, as if I needed to be punished further, as if I had murdered her son.

Anger passed and was replaced by terrible emptiness. I had to leave. I would never see that face again. Right then, I did not want to. Just looking at him hurt me too much. So I turned my face away, and I started to leave. I stopped suddenly and came back. There was something that I could not leave undone. I stood for a moment, bitter tears pricking the corners of my eyes, and mouthed the word _'goodbye'_. And then, as a parting gift, I waved my hand, muttering words softly. The purple sheet and flowers turned green. I nearly smiled. I walked away then, without looking back once, unable to escape the feeling that I had left a part of myself behind.

**-Finite-**


End file.
